Waiting in the hallway at Egbert Intermediate School for her 11-year-old daughter's turn to take a music test, Mary Ann DeMagistris was struck by a pattern.

Each student in turn was leaving the audition room with tears streaming down his or her face.

"It was really cruel because by the 10th kid you kind of knew what the outcome would be," Ms. DeMagistris said. "I felt like I was sending my daughter to the lions."

The auditions were being held to determine each student's placement in the Staten Island Borough-wide Band, a program that offers free music lessons on Saturdays to about 250 students from across the Island. At the end of this school year, the students will put on a performance at Carnegie Hall.

Last month, parents were fuming when 32 students were bumped from the senior band to the junior band after the instructor gave a surprise quiz. Although both bands play at Carnegie, the junior band will open the performance and the senior band will close it -- a more prestigious position.

After receiving a number of phone calls from angry parents, Pat Glunt, who supervises the program in all five boroughs, agreed the process was faulty and that those students would be reassessed. But parents said the new reassessment was just as unfair as the first.

According to officials, 19 students were reassessed last Saturday. Of those, one child was moved to the senior band; two were moved to the senior band but will be re-evaluated on March 7; two, including Ms. DeMagistris' daughter, remained in the junior band but will be re-evaluated on March 7, and the rest were left in the junior band.

Ms. DeMagistris said she was infuriated when she and her daughter had to wait nearly three hours for the audition.

"She's not auditioning for a Broadway show here," she said. "This is a community-type program."

But an Education Department spokeswoman said the auditions were lengthy because the instructors wanted to give each student enough time to relax.

"They didn't want to rush it," said Ann Forte, the spokeswoman. "They wanted to make sure everyone had enough time to feel comfortable."

Still, after watching her daughter's peers walk out of the room, crushed, Ms. DeMagistris began suspecting the auditions were just a "feeble and meanspirited attempt to appease parents."

To hear that her daughter would have to go through it all again on March 7 was no comfort either.

"How many rejections is this kid supposed to take?" she asked. "How many times are you going to be told, 'You're not good enough'?"